


five times sirius came back and one time he didn't

by maggiewilliams



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: 5+1 Things, Angst, Arguments, BUCKETS OF ANGST, Drinking, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Long Shot, M/M, Marauders' Era, Mentioned Severus Snape, Mild Comfort, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Mostly hurt, One Shot, Sirius Black's Flying Motorbike, i made my mom cry when she read it, sorry - Freeform, there is really no remus/sirius action so don't be disappointed, this is actually really sad
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-14
Updated: 2018-08-14
Packaged: 2019-06-27 04:29:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,992
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15678033
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maggiewilliams/pseuds/maggiewilliams
Summary: Sirius Black has a tendency to leave when things get rough.(please read the tags!)





	five times sirius came back and one time he didn't

**Author's Note:**

> enjoy!

There is always a conversation between two people in love that goes something like this:

"When did you first know you loved me?"

"The moment I met you."

"Me too."

Looking back on it, Remus didn't think that the moment he met Sirius was the moment he fell in love. Far from it, actually, considering the extremely loud and annoying Sirius Black was the last person Remus thought he would make friends with their first year, let alone fall in love. That would be silly. They were polar opposites.

It hadn't even been half of their first year when Remus started to rethink his first impression.

Sirius and Remus didn't get along at all. They yelled and bickered and cussed (and in one infuriating incident, shoved a wand into a throat) through two and a half months of term, and now it was the end of November and something had changed for Remus. Maybe it was the apology from Sirius after the wand-to-throat incident, maybe it was the apology from Sirius after the common room incident, but that was as far as Remus got before he started thinking that maybe it wasn't about the apology; it was the fact that Sirius cared enough about Remus to apologize, considering that was not a thing he did very often.

Remus had completely forgiven Sirius by December, but Sirius didn't seem to realize. He mistook Remus's "contently not getting involved in the conversation" silence for "I do not like you at all" silence. That night, when the four boys arrived in their dormitory after dinner, he decided it would be a good idea to say something about it.

"Oi."

Remus looked up from his newest book to find Sirius standing directly in front of his four poster bed with his arms crossed and a look on his face that meant Remus should probably get his wand out just in case.

"Can I help you?"

"Yeah, you can help me. By not being a gigantic prat all the time."

Sirius tried his best to pull a confident face but it looked like he had just smelled dungbombs and was trying not to let it on. Remus cast a look over to James, who shrugged and ever-so-subtly pulled his wand from his bag.

"I don't know what you're talking about," Remus said. Tonight was not the best night for an argument, as they all had an essay assigned in transfiguration and Remus would actually like to get it done tonight.

"At dinner. We all try to talk to you and all you ever do is ignore us. We are trying to make friends--"

"Let it go, Sirius," James said. "Not everyone is as talkative as you."

"No." Sirius turned back to Remus. "I have tried so many times to apologize to you--"

"Then stop trying," Remus said. In immediate hindsight, this was the incorrect thing to say, but the words had already left his mouth, and Sirius had already left the dorm.

James and Peter both stared at him. "Mate," James said quietly, "could you be harsher?"

Before long, the three boys had given up on Sirius coming back anytime soon and had retired to sleeping. Well, Remus hadn't. he stayed awake reading by wandlight for hours, but he wasn't much paying attention to the words on the page. Rather, he was paying much closer attention to the words inside his head, thinking of all the better things he could've said to Sirius, and all the better things he could say if he comes back before breakfast. As he heard Hagrid's rooster crow faintly, Remus almost retired to a few pitiful hours of sleep, but the door slowly opened and Sirius stepped inside.

Remus nox'd his light and swung his legs off the bed, and Sirius tried very hard to close the curtains to his own bed without having to talk to him, but to no avail.

"Sirius, I didn't mean to say that."

"I doubt it."

Remus was sitting on the end of Sirius’s bed while the other boy slowly crawled under the duvet, very pointedly Not Looking at Him. Remus knew there were two sides of Sirius (that he knew of, at least), the side that is loud and confident and holds his head up high, and the side that sits in the same position for hours and overthinks and tried to curl in on himself without being happy ever again. Remus felt a pang in his chest he wasn't expecting when he saw there were tears across Sirius's cheeks, and he wondered the kind of things he said to himself while he was wherever he went.

"I'm not lying."

"You have to be."

"I'm not."

The two of them sat in another silence for a while, Sirius still Not Looking at Him and Remus trying very hard to make Sirius look up, to maybe convince Sirius that he truly wasn't mad at him anymore.

"I'm glad you came back," Remus said, and meant it more than he was expecting.

 

****

From that point on, the four of them together became nearly inseparable.

Nearly.

It was fourth year before anyone had gotten into a real argument, and in Sirius and James's case, it was about fifteen hundred real arguments, each one leaving the other more angry.

Neither Remus nor Peter knew why James had come to term that year with such a foul attitude towards Sirius, and Sirius probably least of all understood it. Usually when James and Sirius had an argument about something, they fixed it before the hour was over, because James had a tendency to babble and Sirius had a tendency to blame everything on himself, but on the first night of term, there was no telltale look of overthinking on Sirius's face, and there was silence from the pulled curtains of James's bed.

Near the end of the year in April, James and Sirius had engaged into a particularly energetic screaming match and Remus and Peter decided to spend the night in the common room playing wizard's chess with Lily and Marlene. Close to midnight, they heard a door slam and a set of heavy footsteps come down the stairs, and no amount of calling his name could stop Sirius from stalking out of the common room, holding his bag. James came down just in time to see the portrait door shut and to have Lily yell as loud as she dared at that hour. James and Lily and Marlene all went to bed, but Peter and Remus stayed up to see how long it would take for Sirius to come back.

He didn't, not that night.

He didn't show up for breakfast, either. James was sulking in their dorm, so Remus and Peter spent most of their Saturday investigating every hiding place they knew of trying to find Sirius. They checked the kitchens first, and the empty classrooms, and all the secret passages, and even the library. By dinner, there was still no sign of him, and Peter was starting to get worried. Lily stayed up with Remus and Peter again that night, and the next morning when they still hadn't seen him, they decided to take a trip to Hogsmeade.

The whole walk down, Lily and Peter were having a pleasant conversation about herbology, and Remus could not stop feeling lonely, even with the other two beside him. He had long since realized he had a small (read: massive) crush on Sirius, and he couldn't ever remember a time he had made this walk without him. Remus could've sworn the walk today was about three times as long as usual.

Peter dragged Remus through all the shops, trying to cheer him up, but despite returning to the castle with a fresh supply of inconspicuous ingredients for disaster and the motherlode of chocolate, both the boys and Lily did not have a wonderful feeling about Sirius being gone for so long.

The three stayed up in the common room, eating chocolate frogs and ignoring the homework that was due the next morning. By midnight, Lily had begun to lose her optimistic attitude towards Sirius's absence.

"D'you think he's in the hospital wing? or in Moaning Myrtle's bathroom? Maybe he managed to find the Chamber of Secrets and he's just stuck there and he can't get out. Or maybe he found a new passage and it took him someplace weird, like the middle of the Forbidden Forest. D'you think he'd get bit by a vampire in there? Maybe the centaurs got him."

"Lily, please, your optimism is killing me."

After another painful hour of speculation, Lily went to bed eventually, and Peter fell asleep on one of the couches. Remus stayed awake, hoping that nothing that she said was true and he was just in the Slytherin common room where they couldn't find him and he would be back in a few hours.

The relief in Remus's chest when the portrait hole opened and a very tired-looking Sirius came through was, at that moment, the best thing Remus had ever felt in his life.

Sirius collapsed onto Remus's lap and muttered, "I'm fine, don't worry about me," before falling asleep right there in his arms, and that was now the best thing Remus had ever felt in his life.

 

****

Something between Sirius and Remus had changed after that. More often than not they had fallen asleep together in the common room or in one of their beds, Sirius curled around Remus, holding him close and not letting him go. They pretended there was not much between them and they were just being best mates, but Remus knew now more than ever how much he loved Sirius, whether the other boy was oblivious or not.

By sixth year, both boys could feel that something had changed between them, but neither of them wanted to admit it. They were together all the time, and Remus was starting to consider that it was the time to confess what he felt to Sirius.

That all went to hell the moment Sirius did the Thing.

The Dreaded, Awful, No Good, Horrible Idea, Why Did He Do That Thing.

It wasn't the moment, really, because Remus wasn't himself Sirius did the Dreaded Thing, and he didn't even hear about it until the morning after in the hospital wing, and he didn't understand what had happened until Madam Pomfrey kicked James out for yelling about the Dreaded Thing and Peter told him exactly what had happened.

At first Remus didn't believe it. How could Sirius do something that could've cost Remus's place at this school and Snape's life? When Remus finally left the hospital wing after dinner, he went straight down to the common room to ask Sirius for his side of the story.

It turned out his side of the story was pretty much no different from James's side of the story, with the added inclusion that it had more to do with Regulus than with Snape, and Remus couldn't even think of a word to voice how angry he was, so he didn't. He walked right by Sirius up to their dorm and stayed up all night with James and Peter.

It wasn't so much that he was angry at Sirius for what he did, it was more that he was angry at Sirius for what he didn't do, which was _think_ . If Sirius would've just thought for one moment how absolutely, ridiculously dangerous it was to send a human to the Shrieking Shack that contained a _werewolf_ , everything would've been fine. But it wasn't fine. It was far from fine. Everything was unfine, because Sirius risked everything that he and Remus could've had to get back at his brother for something that barely even happened, and he didn't know if there was anything between them besides anger anymore.

Sirius never came up to bed that night, and James and Peter never went to their own beds and fell asleep across Remus's lap, and Remus stayed up until morning. The longer he thought about what happened, the less he had an inclination to say anything to Sirius, because all of the insults and yelling and scolding he could do Sirius had probably already said to himself and repeated them a hundred times in his head. It would just be easier not to say anything at all to Sirius, because all of the polite small talk from working together in class would be faker than polite, and Sirius wouldn't stop apologizing and Remus would be forced to say something that either he would regret or something that would be a lie. The last two things Remus ever wanted to do to Sirius now was make him upset or lie to him, and as there was no way he was forgiving Sirius very soon, he couldn't talk to him.

So for two weeks, James and Peter and Remus were very pointedly Not Talking to Sirius.

Coming to the end of those two weeks, Lily had had enough.

She had planned to make such a big scene when she came in for lunch, because Sirius was supposed to follow her in so she could go and yell at James (which was her favorite pastime), but she walked into the great hall and suddenly realized there was no Sirius following her. In fact, when she turned around, there was no Sirius at all. She came into the Great Hall anyway and grabbed Remus and Peter to drag them back to the common room to talk to Sirius. James refused to move for anything related to Sirius at this point, and Lily did not feel so inclined as to touch James in any way to get him to move.

When they got back to the common room, there was no Sirius.

They spread out around the castle to try and find Sirius, but there was still no Sirius.

The three of them decided to wait outside of different locations just in case Sirius was hiding somewhere, because he needed to come out sometime. Lily waited in the corridor that connected the kitchens and the dungeons, Remus waited in the corridor between the Room of Requirement and Gryffindor Tower, and Peter waited just around Moaning Myrtle's bathroom.

A very long time ago, Peter had come up with a genius idea to have coins to send each other messages, but they couldn't figure out how to write messages and instead just made the coin feel like it was burning. They gave their spare coin to Lily when they split up, and told her how to make it burn. It really didn't occur to any of them that if the coin was burning, they wouldn't know who to go to. Remus thought of that when the sickle in his hand became very hot very quickly. He chose to go to Peter first, because he was closer, and because if he ran into Peter on the way down, they could both continue down to Lily.

He arrived at the second floor corridor before long, but Peter was nowhere in sight, and Lily was coming up the stairs towards him too.

"Was it you?" she asked, slightly out of breath.

"No," Remus said.

They looked down the corridor and saw the door to Moaning Myrtle's bathroom was still swinging, so they ran in. It took a moment of searching to find Peter, but Lily called Remus's name to by the sinks, where an extremely distraught Peter was sitting next to an unconscious Sirius. There was an empty wrapper of a bezoar next to his head, and Lily was crouched by Sirius's face, and she held up a small, half-empty vial of a purple liquid Remus assumed to be poison.

Remus carried Sirius to the hospital wing and Madam Pomfrey shooed them out too quick to their liking. None of them said a single word as they made their way back to Gryffindor Tower. The common room was empty save for a few first years in a corner, but Lily paid no attention to them when she pushed both Remus and Peter onto a couch and forced it out of them what exactly was going on. After they told her about the Dreaded Thing, she had just about as many words as Remus did, so she sat down between the two of them and curled up in a ball as they silently worried together.

James came through the portrait hole eventually, and the common room was full again, but none of them moved. None of them really had the heart to move anymore, because this two weeks of Not Talking to Sirius had become something much more than just Not Talking to Sirius, and Remus was getting that awful lonely feeling in his chest again at the thought of not having Sirius to be there at all. Suddenly the whole matter of the Dreaded Thing seemed very long ago, and so very unimportant, because there were bigger things to worry about than the past.

At some point the three of them had shifted positions and fallen asleep, because Remus woke up with a head in his lap and a head on his shoulder, and he noticed that James was now sitting in a chair by the fire with his knees to his chest, writing something but stopping every few moments like he didn't know what to write at all. The head in his lap moved away and Peter stood to talk to James quietly, and Lily moved from his shoulder to a more sitting-up position. She must've been crying at some point, because her cheeks were still red and splotched.

"How could the three of you be so stupid?" It wasn't clear whether she was yelling out of habit or because she needed to yell about something right now.

"What?"

"Ignoring him for two weeks. You are supposed to be his best friend!"

James scowled, which he had been doing a lot of lately and was not as fitting to his face as his usual smirk. "To be fair, it was-"

"There is nothing fair about it! I know what happened, and maybe it would be bad if it happened yesterday, but this was two weeks ago! Believe me, he knows what he did was wrong and now he feels worse about it than when he actually did it. I mean, just look at what happened today!"

"What happened today?"

Lily opened her mouth to yell some more, but this was not the response she was expecting, and she shared a look between Remus and Peter.

"What happened today?" James repeated, leaning forward and putting his quill down.

Remus shook his head at Lily, so she wouldn't tell him, and Peter turned every so slightly away from James.

"He's in the hospital wing," Peter whispered, and James looked from him to Remus to Lily, checking to make sure it was true. He jumped out of his seat suddenly and ran up the stairs to the dorms.

"I can't believe he doesn't even care!" Lily said, quieter than before, but soon enough, they heard more stomping down the stairs, stomping through the common room, and stomping through the portrait hole, even though they never actually saw James come down again.

"At least he cares," Peter said.

He went up to bed shortly after examining whatever James had been writing. Remus was going to read it too, but Lily had laid back down on his shoulder again and he did not want to move her at all.

She had taken his hand at some point, and he could feel that she was shaking in just the slightest, but he didn't blame her. He was scared as hell for Sirius too. The longer the night went on, the more his chest ached from missing him and worrying. Lily next to him was nothing like Sirius next to him. there was a different, indescribable kind of warmth that happened between him and Sirius that was addicting, like he could never live without it, and having Lily instead of Sirius was yet another cold reminder of that.

The first thing that Remus did in the morning when he woke up alone was check their dorm room to wake up Peter. The second thing he did was drag a half-asleep Peter to the hospital wing.

Madam Pomfrey wasn't against the visitors in the morning as long as they stayed quiet, and Peter felt around in the vicinity of the chair next to Sirius's bed and pulled the invisibility cloak off of James, who had fallen asleep on the bed. They pulled up two more chairs as Madam Pomfrey came over to tell them that Sirius was going to be fine and he should wake up within a day or so, but they couldn't stay with him until then.

They sat in anxious silence for a few hours until they had to get to breakfast and to their classes, forcing James to move from his chair. Most of the day was spent in that same anxious silence, and James, Peter, Lily, and Remus all agreed that they would take hour turns staying with Sirius so that he wouldn't wake up alone and Madam Pomfrey wouldn't yell at them. It was an even more anxious two hours for Remus, because he didn't know how to apologize in such a way that Sirius would truly believe him if he woke up while Remus was there.

It was almost about time for Remus to make his way up to the hospital wing when the portrait hole opened and Lily was following Sirius as he slowly stepped over the opening, looking very tired, both physically and emotionally. Remus stood up, and Sirius walked over to him, not meeting his eyes.

"I'm so sorry, Sirius."

Remus could see James and Peter watching from the other side of the common room, and a few others had turned their heads.

"It's okay."

Sirius wrapped his arms around Remus and they sat down together on the chair, Sirius across his lap and Remus almost kissed him right then and there; he knew he missed Sirius but he didn't realize just how much he had missed him and how much this warmth was everything he needed.

"I'm so glad you're okay," Remus whispered as Sirius buried his head into his shoulder, "I'm so glad you came back to me."

He didn't mean to add the "to me" part, but it was as true as everything else he had said, and he could feel the slightest of smiles against his collarbone. He dreaded the moment that they would have to move and talk and think about everything that had happened in the past two weeks, but he knew that he had forgiven Sirius and Sirius had forgiven him and there was nothing better than this moment, right now.

****

 

Remus and Sirius and James and Peter all sat down for a very long while to have a very long talk, most of which was Peter reminding James that he was starting to yell and Remus being reminded just how very much he loves Sirius and just how very stupid they all had been. Everything did turn out just fine, and Remus liked to think that the moments directly after when he and Sirius went to the Astronomy tower were the moments they officially got together, because they never really did ask each other out.

Their sixth and seventh years at Hogwarts were comparatively uneventful, and upon graduating, Remus and Sirius rented out a flat in one of the wizarding districts in London. They didn't spend too much time at their flat; James and Lily were constantly hosting game nights (or drinking nights) at their house in Godric's Hollow. When they weren't all together, Remus was at work and Sirius was with James doing something that Remus wasn't allowed to know.

It was around the realm of April 1979 that Sirius finally told him, and Remus thought it better that he didn't know.

"It's a motorcycle, Moony."

"It's a death trap is what it is."

Sirius had managed to put about five hundred layers of charms, transfiguration, and incredibly dangerous spells onto said motorcycle to make it fly, become invisible, have a "rocket booster," and other horrible-sounding things, and James somehow thought this was a wonderful and hilarious idea.

About two hours and an entire bottle of firewhiskey later, Sirius had the genius idea to try and ride it through London for the first time.

"You are being absolutely stupid," Remus said, watching Sirius attempt to get on the thing without tipping it over. "You could barely even ride my bike, and this is about five times as heavy, and it has an _engine_."

"I will be fine," Sirius said. If his slurred speech meant anything, he would not be fine. "Andromeda rode this baby through London when she was fourteen."

"Andromeda was also not drunk."

"I'm not drunk!"

There was absolutely no amount of convincing Remus could do to stop Sirius from pulling out of the garage and gunning it down the street. Remus was half convinced to start running after him, or Imperius him, but Imperiusing was always Remus's first instinct and it never turned out well, so he just sat down in the living room with James and Lily and tried to not think of the horrible things that could possibly happen in downtown London.

Those thoughts became much worse thoughts when he realized there were Death Eaters in downtown London and Sirius's wand was sitting on the table in front of him.

James managed to force feed Remus some firewhisky and it loosened him up just a little bit, but drunk Remus was not the same as drunk Sirius and James and he did not stop worrying.

Ever.

Especially since it was eight thirty when Sirius left and it was now close to midnight.

Lily had fallen asleep in one of the armchairs and James was laughing his ass off at some Muggle show that Remus didn't recognize, but Remus wasn't paying attention to anything much inside than outside, hoping for the telltale sound of an engine.

It wasn't for another hour did he hear it, and he also heard the still-drunk yelling of Sirius with it.

"Wormy, it's my bike! Let me drive!"

The engine slowed and Remus and James took off into the backyard, where Peter was parking the damaged motorcycle in the garage, and Sirius had apparently attempted to hop off while it was still moving and was lying face-down in the yard.

"Mate, what happened?" James asked, almost doubled over from laughter.

"I did a trick, Prongs, you should've seen it!"

"Yeah," Peter said, throwing James the keys, "almost through my mum's house."

Remus rolled over Sirius, who was still laughing, and saw most of his left arm and leg were torn up from road rash.

"At least you're alive," he muttered.

****

 

A solid six months had passed before Remus ever let Sirius touch the bike again, and another year after that before he trusted him enough to ride with him. It was absolutely exhilarating, and the two had gone on both rides and flights through London at night (with the invisibility on, of course).

When Sirius had run away from home the summer before seventh year, he hadn't expected to ever be in contact with his mother again, so there was a very nasty shock attached to his family's owl sitting in the living room of Sirius and Remus's flat when they returned from a mid-December ride.

Sirius scoffed as soon as he saw her, untying the letter from her ankle.

"What's it about?" Remus asked after a moment.

"Regulus."

Regulus was a very touchy subject with Sirius. They had been best friends up until the Dreaded Thing happened, and even worse enemies when Sirius discovered Regulus had become a Death Eater. Even though he was fiercely protective over his brother, he didn't like to talk about Regulus much, and he certainly didn't like to think about Regulus much.

"What about him?" Remus replied, but he didn't get an answer. Sirius reached over and grabbed the spare parchment they always left on the table, scribbled out a very short reply and sent it with the owl.

“Don't wait for me," Sirius said, and he took his wand and Apparated away.

Remus didn't try and guess where he was going, but he picked up the letter and began to read. He recognized the messy scrawl of someone who was worried and scared, and the ink was splotched and smeared in a way that meant Sirius's mother was crying while she tried to write it.

Regulus had disappeared five days ago without any notice. No one had seen or heard from him at all since then, and Sirius was her last resort. The only sort of clue she had of what happened to him was that he had mentioned a few weeks ago he did not like being a Death Eater anymore.

Remus’s first thought was that Regulus was dead. His second thought was that Voldemort had killed him, or at least ordered someone to kill him. His third thought was that Sirius had probably come to the exact same conclusion and he had just _left with his wand_.

His fourth thought was no longer a coherent thought; it was a panicked mess and an immediate Apparation to Godric's Hollow.

Lily had gone away to visit her mother and father for the holidays, but James was still home and awake when Remus knocked on the door.

The smile on James's face evaporated as soon as he opened it.

Remus had still been holding the letter when he apparated and James read through it, and came to those same conclusions, and immediately panicked.

Neither James nor Remus had any idea of what to do. They didn't want to send out a distress signal to the Order just in case it was a false alarm, because when Sirius was overwhelmed by anything his first instinct was to leave and go run through the woods as Padfoot, but he left _with his wand_ and that never happens when he was just going to run.

So the two of them did what any panicking-yet-mildly-reasonable men did when this sort of thing happened.

They went out drinking.

Well, their intention wasn't to go drinking. They had gone to the Leaky Cauldron to ask if Sirius had come by to see if Sirius had gone drinking, but Tom was just so very friendly, and they stayed for a pint. Or three. Or five.

About five. Probably.

They didn't find Sirius, but drunk James tended to laugh at everything regardless of whether it was funny or not, and drunk Remus was a worrying person but also very gullible, and so the two of them were returning to Remus's flat much less worried than before.

A few more hours had passed before James was less drunk and able to Disapparate back home by himself, and at James's absence, Remus began to worry again. He had just convinced himself to try and Apparate directly to Sirius when said man Apparated almost into Remus’s lap and stumbled and fell onto the floor. He was about twice as drunk as James had been after consuming his fifth pint, and by the smell, he had been knocking back shots and smoking fags between at least three different bars.

"Moony, am I missing an eyebrow?" Sirius slurred.

"Yes, you are," Remus said, choking back a laugh. The entirety of Sirius's left eyebrow was gone, but this was a usual occurrence when Sirius was drunk and Remus had had to grow it back enough times to do it in the morning.

"I thought so," Sirius said, and passed out on the floor.

In the morning, Sirius would explain that he had, in fact, intended to find whatever Death Eaters had killed Regulus, but decided it was a stupid idea and that drinking was a better idea. He would not tell Remus for nearly fifteen years that he had, in fact, found two Death Eaters, killed one, and severely maimed another, and he would not tell Remus at all why he refused to talk to Peter the next night when they saw he had a limp and bandages across his left arm.

 

It must've been hours ago that Sirius had left the flat. The October sky was just barely dark then, but now, as Remus sat out on the deck, the stars were uncharacteristically dull for such a clear night. Perhaps that was what came from downing half a bottle of firewhiskey in one go.

Sirius had stumbled in drunk like he usually did in the morning, muttering something about Peter and mistakes and passing out cold on the couch. Remus spent the day knowing he would have to say something to him about his drinking all the time, and when Sirius woke up around four, he did not take kindly to the conversation Remus had started. Sirius's engagement ring was still laying on the kitchen where he had thrown it as he left, and Remus's was beside it, because one could not be worn without the other. Now that he was drunk, he could stumble past the table and pretend that the rings were there because they hadn't proposed to each other yet, but not being able to see straight didn't cover up the fact that Sirius had left and the flat was empty again and he had _taken his wand_ .

Remus stood by the table with the bottle in his hand, and he didn't know if the sick feeling he got was the alcohol or the weight of being left compressing his chest. He tried to tell himself that he would come back, he always did come back, but he saw the diamond gleam out of the corner of his eye and knew if he ever did come back, it would be to collect his things and leave without a word.

Maybe it was close to midnight now, maybe it was only nine o'clock; all Remus knew was it was dark out and Sirius was gone and the flat was quiet and cold and unforgiving and maybe it would be good to go after him. He had been too distracted to put away the firewhiskey and it was still in his hand, and soon after realizing this the bottle was empty and broken on the wall opposite him. Maybe he could pretend for the rest of his life that Sirius was only out drinking just for a while and he would come back, but Remus saw the empty place where Sirius's wand used to be and knew that if he ever did see him again, it would be in the papers when he went out and got himself killed.

The shards of glass would be a pain to pick out of the carpeting, if he ever got around to it. The simple thought of doing anything without Sirius made him wonder if there was a point to doing anything at all. It was a quiet flat that Remus fell asleep to, quiet and cold and unforgiving without Sirius.  
He woke up to the Daily Prophet owl tapping on his window in the early morning, or night maybe, and in bigger letters than he had seen before was a headline "You-Know-Who Defeated!" For a fleeting moment, Remus had an image of Sirius somehow managing to defeat Voldemort, and at any moment be bursting through the door, but he scanned the rest of the headlines and threw the paper onto the floor, went into the kitchen, and opened another bottle of firewhiskey.

When he came back, the headlines were still glaring at him, and Sirius was never coming back, and neither was anyone else.

  
    "You-Know-Who Defeated!"

    "Potters Dead, Child Survives"

    "Sirius Black Detained, 13 Dead" **  
**

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments appreciated!!
> 
> this work now has a sequel, titled "one more time sirius came back." a little fluffy pick-me-up after this one!


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